Google began rolling out a better option this summer when it introduced a Web version of the Messages texting app it ships for Android 5.0 and newer releases. (If your Android phone includes a different texting app, such as Samsung’s, you’ll need to switch from that to Google’s.) To try that out, open Messages, tap its menu button, and select “Messages for web.”

In your computer’s copy of Chrome, Safari, Mozilla Firefox or Microsoft Edge, visit messages.android.com. Then pick up your phone and tap the “Scan QR code” button in the Messages app and point its camera at the code on that Web page; in a few moments, you should see your texts pop up on that page.

Photos, however, don’t appear with the same consistency as my correspondents’ words and emojis.

You can set up multiple computers for this access, but only one can be active at a time. Your phone also needs to be online for this messages-to-Web link to stay up.

In this setup, you install Microsoft’s Your Phone app on your PC – though built into the October update, you can download it for April’s Win 10 release – and on your Android device, provided it runs the 7.0 or newer release of Google’s operating system.

Open that Android app, sign in to your Microsoft account in it, and follow its prompts to pair it with your PC. They’ll include a request for permission to read and write your text messages; this Android app essentially acts as a remote control for your usual texting app.

Your Phone doesn’t show pictures attached to texts (although it does let you browse your mobile device’s own photos and screenshots), and it shows only your most recent messages. Like Google’s Messages, it also allows only one phone-to-computer pairing at a time.

But it’s easier than Microsoft’s earlier method for putting your texts on your PC, a complicated system that required many more steps to set up.

Things to consider

Both Google and Microsoft’s efforts fall short of the integration Apple offers with iMessage – not to mention Apple’s end-to-end encryption. But because they leave your wireless carrier in the loop instead of routing around it as Apple does, they also shouldn’t incur the risk that switching to the wrong phone will leave friends’ texts disappearing, a common complaint of iMessage users.

Note that all of these systems leave personal correspondence in more places. And if you use text messages as a two-step verification method, they raise the risk of a laptop theft leading to the compromise of your accounts.